Faithful Ambiguity

Can a voice from over a thousand years ago speak to us in our language? Chloe Garcia Roberts makes a persuasive case that it can. Her new translation of Li Shangyin’s selected verse, published in a bilingual edition by NYRB Poets, has made one of the titans of China’s literary tradition freshly available in English. A poet in her own right and managing editor of the Harvard Review, Garcia Roberts has published a book of verse titled The Reveal, as well as an earlier chapbook of Li Shangyin’s minor poems called Derangements of My Contemporaries. She reaches across the centuries to bring Li startlingly close, and the figure that emerges is contemporary but irreducibly enigmatic, always withdrawing beyond our grasp.

Li Shangyin (813-858), also known by his literary name, Yi Shan, lived toward the end of the Tang dynasty. Over the course of his short life, he penned a series of strikingly beautiful compositions regarded as enigmatic even by the standards of his day. Tang poets such as Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu—to name the three most familiar to Western readers—prized suggestion and evocation; Li Shangyin, writing nearly a century after them, pushed this tendency to an extreme, and added a sensuality and allusiveness all his own. If poetry from this tradition is always hard to render in English, Li Shangyin poses unique challenges.

Garcia Roberts identifies two: “The first challenge is the language itself. The divide between poetic Classical Chinese and modern English is vast, particularly in sentence structure, the sparsity of pronouns, the layered symbolism and allusion,” she explains. “The second is Li Shangyin’s particular poetics. He is not by any means a poet who moves completely in tandem with the currents of his tongue. Instead he is constantly playing with, pushing against, subverting the language he writes in.” Translating him entails capturing not only the meaning, but also the occasional strangeness of his words.

Even readers who don’t understand Chinese will be struck by how different the two versions look. The original poems are compact blocks of text, often just a few lines in length, with a uniform number of characters per line (five or seven). The translations, by contrast, typically run twice as long and have shaggily uneven verses.

Classical Chinese has a conciseness that’s nearly impossible to replicate in English, and this poses a dilemma for the translator: do you try to capture the brevity through a string of isolated monosyllables, or fill in the spaces with explanation that’s absent in the original? Garcia Roberts seeks to steer a course between the two extremes. “Where I could, I tried to shave down the English to its sparest possible form,” she says. “However, I did try to maintain a balance, to avoid veering into a parody of the economy of language on one side or over effusion in rendering the lushness of Li’s images on the other.”

An example of her approach is “Retirement,” a short meditation on yearning for home. Here’s the original, followed by her translation.

端居

远书归梦两悠悠
只有空床敌素秋
阶下青苔与红树
雨中寥落月中愁

Retirement

Distant letters, dreams of returning
Both are few and far away.

All I have: an empty bed
Set against a pale autumn.

Down the steps:
Green moss, red trees.

Inside the rain: sinking emptiness.
Inside the moon: anguish.

The English version expands the original’s four lines into four stanzas, yet it still feels pared-down. Garcia Roberts achieves this not by using shorter words or being overly clipped, but by eliminating verbs: the poem consists of sentence fragments linked by colons. In this, she finds a clever substitute for the original’s succinctness, a sort of mirror that obliquely reflects a feature with no obvious equivalent in English.

If brevity is one challenge Li Shangyin poses, ambiguity is another. Often his poems are open to multiple readings—not just differing interpretations, or even various translation possibilities, but distinct ways of parsing the text. Take the first two lines of one of his many untitled pieces:

来是空言去绝踪
月斜楼上五更钟

Come is a hollow word.Go severs all traces.
Moon slants over building roofs.
Bells of the fifth watch.

This is a literal rendering of the Chinese, almost a gloss, yet it’s not necessarily the most self-evident translation. Compare the very different lines by A.C. Graham, in one of many alternate versions of various poems included in an appendix:

Coming was an empty promise, you have gone, and left no footprint:
The moonlight slants above the roof, already the fifth watch sounds.

Graham starts from a very different understanding of the poem: you said you’d come but didn’t, now you’ve disappeared without a trace. By adding “you” and putting the verbs in the past tense, he sketches out a miniature narrative. Garcia Roberts, by contrast, takes come and go to refer to the words themselves, not actions taken by anyone in particular. She avoids creating an explicit backstory, trusting readers to draw their own connections.

The difference between these translations doesn’t lie in their fidelity: both are plausible readings of the poem. It’s a question of how explicit they make what’s implicit, and which aspects of the original they seek to convey—the meaning of the lines, or their brevity, their elusiveness.

This “elusive and haunting quality” is what first drew Garcia Roberts to Li’s poetry. His lines are often tantalizingly hard to pin down, even with China’s long tradition of exegesis. “Maybe similar to the exercise of taking apart an engine to see how it works, my translations at first were simply attempts to better learn, from the inside out, how his poetry could be at once so moving and so unknowable.”

Her versions don’t dispel that unknowability but instead bring it admirably into English. This is no simple task, as a vague sentence is often much harder to render than one whose meaning is precise. “The cryptic nature of his work was an element that I wanted to recreate in the English,” she explains. “There are certainly instances where ambiguity of meaning made my job easier, but there were also instances where the task of rebuilding such ambiguity in an approximation of the exact way it exists in the Chinese cost me a lot of anguish.”

The hardest poem to translate, she says, was “Night Rain Sent North.” Not coincidentally, it’s also one of the simplest. “I’ve always thought of this poem as a perfect Möbius strip of time. It is typical of Li Shangyin in his poetry to move his reader across vast distances, both temporal and physical, but in the last line of this poem he does this so quickly as to almost give us whiplash.” Once again the original is a short block of text, while the English version unwinds into several lines.

夜雨寄北

君问归期未有期
巴山夜雨涨秋池
何当共剪西窗烛
却话巴山夜雨时

Night Rain Sent North

You ask the date of my return.
No date is set.
The autumn pools on Ba Mountain
Welling with night rain.

How will that moment ever be: Together,
Trimming a candle at the west window,
And me, recounting
This rainy spell on Ba Mountain?

In just a few short lines, poem seems to flip time upside down: the speaker, on a rainy night on Ba Mountain, longs to return to a loved one—often understood to be the poet’s wife—and is carried away by that longing to imagine a future moment when they’ll both be together and looking back, not without nostalgia, on this same rainy night. Longing bleeds into memory, and the poem ends where it began.

Li Shangyin has found a distinct and compelling voice in Garcia Roberts. Rather than explaining away his ambiguities, she presents him in all his seductive, suggestive charm. The fragments of meaning she offers, like shards of a glass for the reader to piece together, reflect a flitting, disarmingly beautiful light.